Retinoblastoma genome methylation data

Retinoblastoma is the most common intraocular cancer of infancy and childhood, with an incidence of one case per 15,000 - 20,000 live births. An early event in retinoblastoma genesis is a functional loss of both alleles of the RB1 gene. However, other genes are likely to be involved in the development of this cancer. In this study we sought to build a comprehensive molecular portrait of this cancer by performing transcriptomic, methylomic, genomic profiling of primary retinoblastoma samples. Most of the patients whose tumors were studied had received no treatment prior to surgical enucleation. Immediately following enucleation, a needle was inserted through the eye's anterior chamber to extract a tumor sample by aspiration; the tumor specimen was then snap frozen. For these arrays, DNA was extracted from these snap frozen samples. We used Illumina HumanMethylation450 BeadChip arrays to study the genome methylation patterns of 67 primary retinoblastoma tumors and 3 foetal retina samples.